Over the last decade, CarPlay has become ubiquitous on almost all makes and models of cars.Consumers love it too.In fact, Apple has said before that 80% of new car buyers require CarPlay as a specification before making their purchase.
However, this argument is less satisfactory when it comes to electric vehicles.Aside from Tesla or Rivian, almost all EVs come with CarPlay installed, but its utility is greatly diminished.CarPlay support for electric vehicle routing is just weak.
Apple really needs to step on the gas and get its act together … EV routing support is seriously lacking The most frustrating part of this is that it’s not actually a feature request for Apple to design and engineer features for EV routing, charging stations POIs, and battery range estimates to Apple Maps.These features actually already exist.Apple has done the work.
In compatible vehicles, Apple Maps through CarPlay can take account of your car’s current state of charge, automatically add charging stops for long routes, and show estimates of the battery percentage at each stop of your journey.Apple Maps even integrates real-time charger databases, so you can see how many chargers are available and whether they are currently free, before you arrive.You can even go into Maps settings and choose your preferred charging networks, so if you have favorites or memberships, Maps can prioritize those.
And even without navigation set, if your car battery falls to a low level, CarPlay can automatically suggest a nearby in-range charger to direct you to.So what’s the catch? The primary issue is availability of these features.This functionality is built into iOS, but it is simply not available to most owners of EVs.
The features require integration between the car manufacturer and Apple, and is therefore only available on a select number of vehicles.And when I say ‘select’, I am being generous.Despite this support first rolling out in 2021 with iOS 15, here’s the full list of the currently supported cars for EV routing in Apple Maps: Porsche Taycan Ford F150 Lightning Ford Mustang Mach-E The exhaustive list is composed of just three models, across two makes of car.
Apple could dramatically improve the CarPlay experience in EVs overnight, if they would expand support to cover many more models and manufacturers.In a perfect world, Apple would get the deals done and integrate with all the EVs on the market that are CarPlay compatible, which represents literally millions of vehicles on the road right now.More are being sold every day.
This would mean the car would automatically report its range and state of charge to the connected iPhone, so Maps can incorporate that data into its navigation, as it does for the three supported car models listed above.But if that level of automatic integration is not possible for some reason, Apple could at least give more of the EV routing functionality to anyone who wants to use it.This would be a more manual process, requiring the EV owner to type in their car battery size and the car’s current battery percentage before starting a journey, but something is better than the status quo of nothing at all.
EV routing with battery percentage taken into account helps alleviate range anxiety, and reduces distractions while the driver is on their route, about whether they need to worry where to stop.Maps can also suggest how long you should top up at each charging stop and give a more accurate ETA estimate before setting off; again, these are all existing Apple Maps features that are just not accessible right now unless you have one of those three aforementioned cars.Non-Ford or Porsche Taycan owners right now have to resort to using third-party apps, like A Better Route Planner (which actually charges a subscription to be used inside CarPlay), or ‘dual-apping’ by running their in-car satnav and Apple Maps in CarPlay at the same time.
While I love the UI and user experience of Apple Maps in general, its usefulness when using it in an EV is substantially worse than when I drive with it in a gas car.Missing features for EV drivers Let’s assume that Apple does add the existing set of EV functionality to more cars.Then, we can talk about missing features for this growing class of users.
One big outstanding omission is CarPlay currently has no means to trigger battery preconditioning, a process which heats the battery before arriving at a rapid highway charger to improve charge rates and reduce time spent waiting at the charger.If the driver is using the built-in navigation on the Mustang Mach-E, for instance, battery preconditioning kicks in automatically as the car approaches a planned stop at a charging station.Routing through CarPlay will not do this, which is particularly frustrating when you find out that it does indeed work for Android Auto users driving with Google Maps.
Battery preconditioning is table-stakes functionality, and Apple isn’t at the table.Apple Maps could also do a better job at showing charging stops nearby, and letting users filter by price or other attributes.Apple Maps database does not include prices, and you can’t easily browse to a place in the app and get an overview of all the nearby chargers and their capabilities.
When it comes to routing, people also have different preferences.Some drivers want to go off the fastest route to save money at low-priced charging stations, some want to make more but shorter stops, while others want to just get to their destination as fast as possible.Apple Maps does not support this level of fine-grained route optimization at all, unlike competitors like ABRP.
Conclusion In summary, the CarPlay EV experience for the blessed three cars is incomplete, and non-existent for everyone else.Apple should simply do better here. You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day.
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